I don't know if y'all know this, but
there's more to volleyball than just smacking it over the net.
Right?! It's like how I learned in 4th grade soccer that
you don't just blindly chase the ball, you have to play a position...
Which is when I started to be bored by soccer.
Well, I recently joined a volleyball
team. I will describe how I came to be on the team just as I
described it to the others who had no idea who I was:
“Oh, well, I played volleyball
against James's team this summer and then you know, Pete? Well, I
know Pete because he works at Southie Bar and he invited me to his
Pride party. So I went to the party and met James, who is the
boyfriend of Jack, who is Pete's roommate, so James was there and
asked me to be on the team.”
All this translates into I know no one
on the team. And I don't really know how to play volleyball. James
saw me play beach volleyball, which is like watching someone play NFL
Blitz on the N64 (Nintendo Reference #1) and asking them to be
quarterback on your inter-mural football team. There's some
correlation, but then there's all this weird stuff that happens that
I just don't get.
At one point during our practice
tonight, a team member hit the ball over the net. What happened after
this can only be correlated to what happens with the Hammer Brothers
in Super Mario 3. (Nintendo Reference #2) If you don't know what this
is, I'll explain it. In the map in Mario 3, there are these turtles
who move around the map. They shuffle around after you complete a
level or die. They can majorly suck because sometimes they shuffle in
front of you and you have to beat them before you play the next
level. Anyway, any time you complete a level they move randomly
around the map to block your progress. I looked for a good twenty
minutes to find this clip (8:09, watch the green turtles).
And that's what happened at volleyball.
Serve. Shuffle. And I'm like, “Wha happened?!” Everyone ran
around and ended up on opposite sides of the court and upside and
somehow tapioca pudding was involved. I guess this is a volleyball
thing. You can switch positions for some reason and evidently
sometimes you just move totally around the floor and “push up”? I
wish I had any idea of what that is. Basically everyone got really
irritated that I didn't know what was happening and roared like
Bowser hitting a banana (Nintendo Reference #3).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BpmD5UvJpA (Won't let me imbed this! RAW-RAWR!)
Prior to even starting playing they
were talking about where people were playing and everyone is like,
hitter! Middle! Tapioca Pudding! And I had no idea what was going on.
I mean, I could kind of assume what was happening based on the word
“Hitter!” and then the position the person took on the floor.
This was true in all cases except for the one girl on our team who
stepped forward and says, “I can play libero if needed.”
I swear wind chimes played and a
mandolin somewhere played a few notes.
“You see... You didn't know, but all
along, I was...the libero!”
I'm pretty sure that's either an
Antonio Banderas movie, or that song for the fire temple in Zelda
(Nintendo Reference #4).
This basically devolved into hammer
brother shuffling, Antonio Banderas Libero-ing, and people yelling at
me every thirty seconds to move.
“Okay, Tedd, they're going to hit the
ball and then you're going to run to the opposite side of the floor.”
“Wait...why?”
“Go!”
This made especially little sense to me
when people would be running to another place and a ball would hit
between the two people switching places.
Eventually I just kind of got it and
was moved around the floor. We did okay and I spiked it really hard a
couple times to get points, kind of making me feel like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYx34GpuRlo (Sigh... This either...)
(Nintendo Reference #5)
I don't know how this season will go,
but I hope volleyball doesn't continue to be as frustrating as a
Hyrulean Water Temple (#6) but rather as awesome as getting the hyper
beam in Super Metroid (#7). Either way, I think everything will be
pretty tapioca pudding, and if not there's always writing the script
for Libero II: Bumpo, Seto, Spiko! Featuring this as the theme song:
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